The Skeleton's Knee, page 9
part #4 of Joe Gunther Series
I neatened up my paperwork and crossed over to J.P.’s desk in the middle of the squad room. “I got something extra I’d like you to do when we get to Fuller’s.”
“Shoot.”
“I want you to go over the contents of that stove with a fine-tooth comb. If my hunch is right, you should find at least some trace of newly burned paper mixed in with the wood ash, near the front of the stove door. I think Fuller destroyed a document or a letter just before he was taken to the hospital.”
Tyler quietly nodded and crossed over to the closet where he kept his forensics bag of tricks.
The trip back up to Coyner’s remote property was made largely in silence. I had Dennis and Tyler with me; Sammie and Willy Kunkle were in separate cars.
At first, I wrote the quiet drive off to the contrasting personalities of my passengers. Dennis DeFlorio was as much a slob as Tyler was neat and precise, and they were not given to idle chats under the best of circumstances. But the farther we drove, the more I began to share their lack of enthusiasm for the search. Looking for the gun would be a long and tiresome procedure, and probably a fruitless one at that. Moreover, if by some miracle we did locate it, what would it prove? It would no longer have any prints on it, and any serial numbers would doubtless lead nowhere; a man of Fuller’s intelligence and caution would hardly have left behind a gun so easily traceable. The net result, if this all proved accurate, would be another brick wall, and although our efforts had only just begun, I was already feeling a sense of futility. We’d made some progress on the case, but nothing had brought us any closer to the solution of a more than twenty-year-old homicide.
By the time we arrived at Coyner’s house, Kunkle was already there with the rented metal detector, predictably giving voice to all our doubts. “Hey, Joe, we really going to hunt around for this guy’s gun?”
“Yeah. Anyone seen Coyner?”
Sammie, sitting in the passenger seat of her car with her legs stretched out toward the breathtaking view of the valleys below, answered, “I knocked—no answer.”
I checked my watch. “Okay, let’s get moving; we’ve got about five hours of light left.”
Tyler held up a canvas bag he’d brought along, adding without humor, “And flashlights for everybody.”
The general mood did not improve much during the afternoon, even with Tyler’s discovery, after painstaking work with tweezers and a magnifying glass, of the blackened remains of a letter in the wood stove. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell us more, since his conclusions were based on a few minute scraps of shiny ash.
It was, however, the sole highlight of the afternoon. The rest of our time was spent crisscrossing Fuller’s horticultural masterpiece in two teams, one detector apiece, stopping every few feet to investigate whatever set the machines off. Sometimes the reason was an old nail, a lost tool, the remains of a container; other times nothing was found, and when the area was rechecked after some digging, the detector stayed mute. J.P. hypothesized about the effects of iron in the soil; Kunkle was both less charitable and more crude.
At sunset I feared that morale had dipped so low I would have to call it quits. Instead, I had Tyler radio for the department’s emergency services van, equipped with portable halogen lamps, by whose light we continued along our narrow, predetermined search grids. I kept hopefully silent while the others punctuated their work with increasing complaints about the cold, the equipment, and their fate in general.
Since there were five of us, the odd member of the group sat out a quarter hour while the other four worked on. At around 7:45, the sun long since set, I was sitting on Fuller’s front stoop, watching the others shuffling through their paces near the edge of the woods, their shadows sharp-edged by the harsh lights, when for the hundredth time I heard the persistent complaint of one of the detectors. I saw Sammie’s diminutive form stop, while Dennis’s bulk dropped to all fours and began to scratch the earth’s surface with a hand spade he’d borrowed from the toolshed. He sat back on his haunches a few minutes later, a small pile of dirt by his side, and Sammie played the detector across the surface of the shallow hole once more. The chirping reached my ears again.
I got up and walked toward them, hearing Dennis swearing as he bent to his task again, scooping out larger clods, assisting the spade with his other hand now. Once more, Sammie swept over the hole with the detector’s broad, flat, horizontal disk. It sounded a third time.
“Goddamn it,” Dennis growled and reached into the hole.
“What’d you think?” I asked Sammie.
She shrugged noncommittally, but her eyes were tightly focused on Dennis’s work. “Beats me. First time it’s been this deep.”
Tyler and Kunkle crossed over to us, having marked their spot with their own machine. Without asking, Willy fell in next to Dennis, his one powerful hand making his own spade work like a miniature steam shovel.
After they’d gone down about two feet, I interrupted them, aware of Dennis’s heavy breathing and the gleam of sweat on the back of his neck. “Try it again.”
The detector repeated itself, its irritating alarm now egging us on. I switched places with DeFlorio. Kunkle stayed where he was, muttering, “This better be something, or I’m out of here. This is bullshit.”
“At least it’s easy digging,” I commented, half to myself.
“Yeah—I noticed that,” Willy said in a voice that made me pause to look up at him.
He grinned back at me. “Kind of makes you wonder.”
It was true, I thought. Vermont soil is notoriously “bony”—as rock-strewn as a boulder field—and all afternoon, in response to the detectors’ urging, we’d been proving that generality correct. But here, the consistently soft, almost wet earth moved under our spades as in a well-tilled garden—except that we were far below the level of Fuller’s lovingly tended soil.
At three and a half feet, Dennis and J.P. were hanging on to us for dear life, trying to keep us from falling into the narrow hole. Each scoop of the spade now had to be followed by a grunting heave back up to the surface so the dirt wouldn’t slide back to the bottom, but neither Willy nor I would be relieved. Driven by the detector’s persistence, we were now convinced we were close to discovery, although Willy, true to form, disguised his own excitement by muttering, “Probably a fucking Model T under here.”
We all knew it as soon as my spade made contact, sending up a single sharp clang that froze us all in position.
“Shine a light in here,” I ordered.
Four bright halos cascaded into the hole where I was hanging almost upside down. I stuck the spade into the soft earthen wall around me and used my bare hand to brush the dirt away.
“What the hell is that?” In their craning to see, I felt someone’s grip loosen on my legs, then felt myself slide down the hole until my nose was almost flat on the bottom.
“Goddamn it.”
When I scooped the earth away, I discovered a bright, shiny stainless-steel globe, about the size of an orange. I carefully worked my fingers to either side of it, trying to gain some definition. It was attached to two darker, grittier objects that extended from it at a forty-five degree angle, like shafts from the apex of some oversized drafting compass. Indeed, now that I could see it better, I knew the metal ball was actually a hinge, beautifully designed, immaculately crafted, and surgically precise.
“Pull me back up.”
They dragged me over the edge and went back to staring at our small, twinkling treasure, ignoring me as I tried scraping some of the mud from my stomach and face.
“It’s some sort of machine,” Dennis said tentatively.
“In a way,” I answered. “It’s an artificial stainless-steel knee joint, and it’s attached to a skeleton.”
10
“HELLO, LIEUTENANT.”
I turned away from the jumble of people setting up staging and equipment by the roped-off grave site and saw Beverly Hillstrom coming toward me. I had called her right after discovering the skeleton, to ask her advice on how to deal with it. It was now 10:00 A.M. the following morning.
I smiled at her with genuine pleasure and shook her slim, elegant hand. “Doctor. It’s wonderful to see you; I thought one of your regional MEs would be attending. I didn’t know you were coming.”
“I wasn’t going to initially, but then I couldn’t resist it. Besides, once I’d recommended a forensic archaeologist, I thought the least I could do was to introduce him personally.”
She turned and gestured to a short, wiry man whose face was as bushy with black hair as his head was gleamingly bald. His eyes looked enormous behind thick, dark-framed glasses, and he squinted at me slightly as we exchanged formalities, as if considering what a slice of me would look like under a microscope.
Hillstrom beamed between us, the immaculate hostess. “Dr. Boris Leach—Lieutenant Joe Gunther.”
Leach’s eyes shifted away from me after a cursory glance, focusing instead on the activities by the hole. His hand was cold and limp in mine, and I dropped it as soon as I could.
“Lieutenant, I take it no one has aggravated the hole any further?” He stepped around me and ducked under the yellow Mylar “Police Line” we’d used to surround the site.
Hillstrom patted my arm quickly and smiled, encouraging me to ignore Leach’s arrogant tone of voice. I realized then she wasn’t here purely out of professional curiosity. When I’d called her about the skeleton, she’d warned me that Leach was no Miss Manners; she’d obviously decided upon reflection to run interference between us.
I lifted the barrier for her and we followed in Leach’s wake. “It’s just the way we left it last night, except for what your assistant dropped off a while ago.”
He stood at the edge of the hole, now illuminated by the bright, cool sunlight. The metal knee joint shone like a white spark, nestled in its pit. He looked around suddenly, “Where’s the backhoe? I told Henry specifically to request a backhoe. I can’t be expected to remove four feet of dirt by myself. It’s idiotic… Pointless.”
I held up my hand to interrupt him. “It’s coming, Doctor; it should be here in a few minutes. What about everything else?”
That sidetracked him for a while. He left us to examine the pile of equipment his twitchy, birdlike assistant Henry had brought in a pickup truck some forty-five minutes earlier.
Watching him, I muttered to Hillstrom, “Too many years digging in the Gobi Desert?”
She smiled like an indulgent mother. “Take the bad with the good, Lieutenant. This man is very good.”
Leach returned from his inventory and fixed me with his fierce owl-wide eyes. “Who’s the forensics man on your team?”
“J. P. Tyler.” I shouted over to J.P., who was doing his own surreptitious examination of Leach’s assembled hardware.
Rather than waiting for Tyler to join us, Leach marched off and made his own introductions. Both men took hammers and large spikes and set off toward opposite trees near the grave site. Once there, they drove the spikes into the trunks, fastened them to the ends of two reeled measuring tapes, and unrolled the tapes toward the hole, establishing both a double set of fixed surveying points and an accurate triangulation system. From now on, all maps of the site would feature the two trees, and all items on that map would be measured from them. Indeed, even as I was admiring the simple efficiency of the plan, I saw Leach thrust a drawing pad, a pencil, and a ruler into Tyler’s hands.
At that point, Leach shouted over to Hillstrom. “You can play photographer now, if you want to earn your keep.”
Hillstrom merely chuckled and pulled a camera from the bag hanging off her shoulder. Even considering our friendship, it never would have occurred to me to address her in such a tone.
From that point on, Dr. Leach was like a caricature general in the field, shouting orders to his troops and doing most of the work himself.
After a quick sketch of the scene as it was, the surface debris of leaves and stray stones was cleared away to reveal the true topography of the land. Shovels were handed out, and slowly, inch by inch, the top layer of soil was removed over about a ten-foot-by-five-foot area, revealing at first a uniform mantle of dark, moist, nutrient-rich dirt.
I wandered near Hillstrom at one point in this drawn-out process and asked how deep we were going to go. She shook her head in shocked amusement. “Not to worry. That’s why he was asking for the backhoe. Soil like this is divided into two parts: The upper layer can be about eight inches deep, like it is here, and it tends to be dark and rich. Below it is the lighter-colored, generally sandier layer, which usually goes down until you hit ledge or water or whatever. The premise is that if you dig a grave, you’ll punch through the top and burrow into the lower layer, but when you later fill in the hole, the dirt you throw in will be a mixture of both dark and light. So, years later, if you skim the dark topsoil off a larger surrounding area, chances are you’ll discover one spot in the lighter, deeper soil that looks slightly different, because it’s been disturbed. That’s how you know exactly where your grave is.”
“But we know where the grave is,” I persisted, unembarrassed to display my archaeological ignorance.
“Yes, but we don’t know its orientation or size. People rarely dig nice big, deep rectangular holes for their murder victims. They do what they can in a hurry, crunch their victims up as tightly as possible, and stuff them in. Boris and I have found them headfirst, balled up, and cut into pieces. It’s amazing.”
Her explanation was right on the mark. At about one foot down, a barely perceptible darker patch, about three and a half feet around, distinguished itself from its pale surroundings. The hole we’d dug the night before was right at the edge of it.
The backhoe had long since arrived, accompanied but not operated by the high-strung Henry, whom Leach put to work laying out wooden stakes and a grid. Once a cut line was established, the machine started digging a wide, deep trench right next to the grave site.
Leach stood next to me as we watched the backhoe at work. “You ever been to a dig before?” he asked suddenly without looking at me.
“No.”
“Well, it’s a pain in the ass to dig straight down. The position’s uncomfortable, the visibility stinks, and the dirt keeps falling back into the hole. Plus, if the body’s still ripe, the stench comes straight up at you. Much easier to put a trench alongside the site and work at it in comfort, directly in front of you. Then it’s more like emptying a chest of drawers, from the top one down.”
I was about to thank him for this unexpected tidbit when he left as abruptly as he’d come, signaled to the backhoe operator to stop, and jumped over the trench like some bespectacled billy goat, falling to his knees at the point where the light dirt and the mixed dirt met. He used a long knife to cut a cake-sized wedge between them and then signaled to me to join him.
I knelt down by his side, and he pointed at the cleavage the wedge had left behind. “Shovel marks left by whoever dug the hole. You can see from the scalloped cut that it was a spade-shaped shovel, about twelve inches wide at the base and slightly curved.”
He looked up suddenly. “Beverly—where the hell are you? You want to take possession of this mess fast, you’ve got to help me out.”
Hillstrom, standing nearby, shook her head silently and joined us, focusing her camera on the evidence as Leach laid out a ruler for comparison. In the meantime, I called over to Dennis to check the toolshed for a shovel fitting Leach’s description. As I did so, I noticed State’s Attorney James Dunn quietly joining the crowd at the police barrier, as irresistibly drawn to this death scene as he was to all the ones I’d ever attended during his tenure. I’d realized by now that we’d be here most of the day; it astounded me that Dunn’s specialized curiosity would allow him to abandon the office for so long on such short notice. Hard to keep a man from his personal interests. I gave him a small wave and went back to being a spectator.
The trench now complete, Leach set to work in earnest, scraping the side of the dirt wall before him until the faintest change in color indicated he was right at the wall of the narrow, vertical, cylindrical grave. Then, as he’d told me he would, he set to work removing the dirt from the top down.
By the time he’d reached the artificial knee, Dennis had returned with a shovel, and we took a brief pause to document that we had indeed found a match for the scars in the dirt. This was no small matter to me privately, for while everyone else was narrowly focused on the task at hand, I was still wondering if the body in the hole had anything at all to do with Abraham Fuller. The shovel was a comforting bridge over that gap. It didn’t prove culpability; it didn’t even point at Fuller, since it was perfectly possible that the shovel was Coyner’s and that he’d buried Old Kneecap before Fuller had appeared on the scene. Nevertheless, it was a link, until something better came along.
The artificial knee, it turned out, was the highest point of the body, since both upper and lower leg bones angled downward from where we’d found it. Indeed, as Leach progressively laid bare the skeleton, we could all see that it rested upside down on the nape of its neck, its torso curved and twisted skyward and its heels tucked in so as not to stick out of the ground.
With that much clear, but with most of the body still encased in dirt, Leach summoned Tyler, Henry, Hillstrom, and me to his side.
“Okay, this is what we’ve got so far. You”—he pointed at Tyler—“take measurements and make a sketch while I point all this out. Henry, help him.”
Hillstrom had already begun taking photographs, so he left her alone and, standing before the half-visible skeleton as he might have before a blackboard, focused on me. “We’re looking at an adult, probably fully grown—whether male or female, I don’t know. It’s about six feet in length, which would statistically indicate a male, but that can be misleading—there are a lot of tall women around.
“He or she was dressed at the time of death in what looks to be a nylon shirt and a pair of blue jeans, but he wasn’t wearing any shoes. If he was wearing a sweater, all traces of it have long since vanished, but I’m pretty sure he was not wearing a coat of any kind. The only buttons here are consistent with the shirt alone.”
